Build A Robot And Program It With An Actual Coding Language In RoboCo

Filament Games is releasing RoboCo, a robotics sandbox game with an engineering twist.

RoboCo has a campaign of challenges where you must solve problems by building a robot, with a robust robot builder tool to make all kinds of creations- even the cursed ones.

And there’s an option to add googly eyes.

Think Besiege, but instead of mowing down enemies, RoboCo’s contraptions are all about assisting humans’ daily lives like… delivering sandwiches, vacuuming the room and other (thankfully) mundane activities.

You can play it like any other contraption builder where you can slapdash together something and somehow complete the objectives by controlling the robots manually. But you can also, like a proper robot, automate them.

The twist here is that RoboCo lets you automate the robots by making a program in Python. That’s an actual coding language used in real-world applications and something you might learn if you enter a computer programming course in a STEM-related field.

Usually, games that have programming elements don’t really use actual coding languages (the Zachtronics problem-solving games use fictional equivalents), so it’s a nice surprise to see a game that lets players who have the knowledge leverage that expertise. And it might inspire some players to learn to code- don’t worry, Python should be easy to pick up and learn.

In addition, all the robots can be shared with the community via Steam’s workshop feature.

RoboCo will be released in Early Access, and sometime in 2023, it will add the ability to switch between VR and desktop mode. VR mode lets you build the robots by hand, which is neat.

RoboCo launches on Steam Early Access on November 3.